Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Near death experience caused by electrical activity in dying brain (bbc.co.uk)

Dupple writes: A surge of electrical activity in the brain could be responsible for the vivid experiences described by near-death survivors, scientists report.

A study carried out on dying rats found high levels of brainwaves at the point of the animals' demise.

US researchers said that in humans this could give rise to a heightened state of consciousness.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The lead author of the study, Dr Jimo Borjigin, of the University of Michigan, said: "A lot of people thought that the brain after clinical death was inactive or hypoactive, with less activity than the waking state, and we show that is definitely not the case.

"If anything, it is much more active during the dying process than even the waking state."

Submission + - Samsung Invents a Clever Cardboard Printer That Folds Up (superperolas.org)

superperolas writes: Lately, the future of printing has been all about 3-D. Every day there seems to be a new advancement that is supposed to totally revolutionize the way we live and create things. It’s almost enough to forget that actual printers (Remember those? The old-school kind that spit out ink and paper?) are advancing, too. Designers are still pushing the boundaries of what we can do in the realm of at-home printing, and the ideas they’re coming up with are actually pretty cool.

Submission + - Version 2.0 Of 3D-Printed Rifle Successfully Fires 14 Rounds (ibtimes.com)

coolnumbr12 writes: The world’s first 3D-printed rifle, named “The Grizzly” after Canadian-built tanks used in World War II, was fired in June, but the first shot fractured the barrel receiver. The creator, a Canadian man who simply goes by “Matthew,” refined his design and posted a video Friday on YouTube of Grizzly 2.0 successfully firing 3 rounds of Winchester bullets. The video description says the Grizzly 2.0 fired 14 rounds before it cracked. The new rifle was also safe enough for Matthew to fire it by hand rather than the string system used in the first test.

Comment Royalist (Score 4, Funny) 503

I voted whig, but only because royalist and unionist (in the Irish sense) were missing. When you rebellious colonists come back to accept the supremacy of the crown and parliament you will cure all the social, welfare and cultural ills that are prevalent throughout "America".
Constitutional monarchy rules. OK

Comment Not news (Score 4, Insightful) 74

From Wikipedia zero day exploit

For example in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001.[4] The date the vulnerability was first found by an attacker is not known; however, the vulnerability window in this case could have been up to 7 years.

Looks like we've known about this for quite some time

Comment Just Asking (Score 1) 144

As a proud UK subject (we are NOT citizens), I don't understand the lack of "social belonging" that is shown by so many colonists posters. Is it because by starting with an illegal act and armed uprising the conspiracy of "founding fathers" set a precedent which is still followed by this generation, or is it because a mongrel mix of immigrants from minority cults and diverse cultures has failed to form a cohesive "nation".
The police force should be seen as an integral part of society, and respected as defending the values of it. You claim to be democratic republic, so either you have the laws and constabulary that a majority wants, or you have failed to use your votes to that end.
If you admit that the majority of your society is happy with the current policing policy, but are personally against it, then you should either accept the will of the majority as the cost of the (other) benefits of citizenship (while using your freedom to try and persuade your fellow voters to change that policy), or give up that citizenship and emigrate. If your claim is that the majority of the electorate do not agree with the current policy, then I do not understand how that could come about unless your republic is not democratic.
As a bystander, I acknowledge that I have no right to criticize, but I would like to understand.

Comment well deserved (Score 1) 3

Firstly, he was guilty of bad taste, and bad style, and given that any reasonable person would have thumped him at first sight, he was guilty of behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace. And then he was on a suspended sentence.
He should consider himself lucky he didn't get a couple of years.

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Patents 1826 Choropleth Map Technique

theodp writes: A newly-granted Microsoft patent for Variable Formatting of Cells covers the use of 'variable formatting for cells in computer spreadsheets, tables, and other documents', such as using the spectrum from a first color to a second color to represent the values in or associated with each cell. Which is really not a heck of a lot different from how Baron Pierre Charles Dupin created what's believed to be the first choropleth map way back in 1826, when he used shadings from black to white to illustrate the distribution and intensity of illiteracy in France. BTW, beginning in March, the U.S. will switch from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system of granting patents. Hey, what could go wrong?
Security

Submission + - Civil Rights Captcha employs an empathy test to ward off spambots (gizmag.com)

cylonlover writes: Loathe it as we do, the captcha goes a long way to preventing websites from being inundated with spam comments produced by nefarious software. However, there’s room for improvement, and rather than tasking a user with a series of random words which must be entered in order to be allowed to comment on a website, the Civil Rights Captcha employs an empathy test to measure whether you pass muster. The Civil Rights Captcha is the brainchild of Civil Rights Defenders, a Sweden-based international human rights organization. The organization states that it has created the new captcha in order to provide a simpler and more effective method of keeping websites spam-free, in addition to drawing attention to the importance of human rights.

Slashdot Top Deals

"When anyone says `theoretically,' they really mean `not really.'" -- David Parnas

Working...